and then on to partes easte. St Petersburg is pretty awesome, very beautiful, lots to see - I spent a day in the Hermitage and you could easily spend longer. I also saw a dude take a bear cub for a walk there. Highly recommended. There's a lot of stuff to do in Moscow and very much worthwhile but it's an ugly, edgy heap. Be aware that unlike Europe 'proper', very few people speak English. Everything's in Cyrillic, though it's very easy to 'decode' into Roman alphabet, worth spending an hour memorising it.

St Petersburg is beautiful, although apparently gets an extraordinary amount of rain over the year. Strongly recommended.

Moscow is very oppressive and rather unfriendly. This is not particularly anti-Western, it's quite clear that they are quite cold (by our standards) to each other. But clearly worth doing for the full Russian experience.